


Karkat: suffer incurable case of compassion.

by Laylah



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Biopunk, Homestuck Shipping Olympics, M/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:53:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat found the vampire in an alley, retching, huddled up in a miserable little ball, and if he were anyone else—anyone reasonable, with a sense of self-preservation—he would have just kept walking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Karkat: suffer incurable case of compassion.

Karkat found the vampire in an alley, retching, huddled up in a miserable little ball, and if he were anyone else—anyone reasonable, with a sense of self-preservation—he would have just kept walking. You saw people get fucked up by things they couldn't handle all the time, especially the supernaturals; they weren't built for this environment.

But the problem was, Karkat _was_ built for this environment. Built and then refined, even, with the finest virus cocktail his irritatingly brilliant biohacker friend could distill. He was capable of helping. (Sollux would be quick to point out that being _interested_ in helping was Karkat's very own home-grown personality flaw, not something that anyone else had infected him with.)

So he turned down the alley when he should have walked by, and he got down on his knees in fuck only knew what kind of filth, and he put a hand on the vampire's shoulder. The poor stupid fuck was wearing a _cape_. He'd probably just come out of a torpor state and tried to make a snack out of somebody like it was still a hundred years ago and nobody had any defenses. Idiot.

"Hey," Karkat said. The vampire made a completely awful self-pitying noise. "Fuck you, it's not the end of the world."

"H-how wwould you know," the vampire sniffled, and Karkat's bloodpusher did that stupid twinging thing that was the only physical symptom of his incurable case of compassion. "You got no idea wwhat I'm goin through."

"You woke up needing a snack," Karkat said, "so you came swanning out of your ancestral lair looking for someone you could charm into doing hemoglobin duty, and then boom, first swallow you take you're being sick all over yourself. Am I close?"

The vampire sniffled again and then glared up at Karkat, watery-eyed. "You in on it or somefin?"

Karkat sighed. "No. Look, things have changed a lot in the last few decades, okay? Come here." He slid an arm around the vampire's shoulders and pulled him in close. "Don't bite me or you'll be sick again. Just breathe for a minute."

He put a hand on the back of the vampire's neck so the skin-on-skin contact could get his pheromones going. They were top-of-the-line stuff, a two-virus mutation that his job had paid for—when you worked with recovering cryo cases, being able to calm people down at an instinctive level was a damned useful skill.

For a second he wondered if it would actually work, whether the undead would still respond to the 'mones when they were designed to work on living people, but then the vampire took a deep, shaky breath and slumped against Karkat with a sigh. "Evveryfin's wweird," he told Karkat's shirt collar.

"Yeah," Karkat agreed, rubbing the vampire's back soothingly. "You're probably going to have to get used to buying your dinner at the store like everyone else. Just about everyone's innoculated these days." He glanced down and the vampire was giving him another stupidly bewildered look. "You don't even know what that means, do you."

"I ain't stupid," the vampire muttered. "Just a lot to get used to, is all."

Karkat found himself having a sudden, horribly clear vision of the future: he was going to take this disaster home, with a stop at the corner convenience store for a type o six-pack, and despite himself he was going to try to help this poor outdated predator adjust to the world he just woke up in. Congenital decency strikes again.

"Okay, come on," he said, helping the vampire up. "Some poor bastard's going to have to show you around, and the universe has apparently volunteered me."

The vampire's eyes went wide with gratitude and he beamed. It was kind of a nice smile if you didn't mind the oversized fangs. "You mean it?"

"God help me," Karkat said. "I do."


End file.
